GONE WITH THE WIND
HeHe site specific artwork for the railway station area @
Beatrixgebouw Jaarbeurs, Utrecht, NL
10.10.16 – 06.01.17

A small crane in the station area slowly rotates, following
the direction in which the wind is blowing. If you look long
enough, it soon becomes apparent that the crane cannot do
what cranes are designed to do: move building materials over
the roof of houses or from one area of a building site to
another. This tower crane ends in a thunderbolt-like shape,
an almost organic drawing of lines, that suggest an
unravelling.

In an area so completely and totally under renovation,
adorned with a skyline of tower cranes, this artwork of
artist duo HeHe might be overlooked during daytime. The work
just seems to be part of the building site and the
ever-changing environment. But the crane's arm, which draws
the background with its lightning shape, does not tell a
story of construction, change and improvement but rather of
explosion, degradation and a more savage, uncontrollable
energy.
The controlled characteristics of a major construction site
mutate here into an untamed energy of change of which the
goals are uncertain. What this tower crane is helping to
build, we do not know. It is a visual reminder of what we
make and build will always be temporary, what looks solid
might actually be fragile.

For Cape Farewell’s annual Lovelock Art Commission hosted by
the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester (MSI), HeHe
have taken inspiration from James Lovelock's Gaia Theory and
latest climate science funded by the Natural Environment
Research Council (NERC). The Cloud Crash exhibition
consists of three new art installations: Burn Out, Airbag
and Diamonds in the Sky. Man-made clouds are blowing through
the Manchester's industrial heritage site.

Clouds occupy a special place for artists, their countless
forms offering infinite possibilities for metaphor. For
climate scientists, understanding how clouds regulate the
Earth’s temperature is an expanding area of research.
Through vehicle exhaust fumes, ozone gases and non-stop
carbon emissions, human activity has an invisible impact on
the atmosphere. The air we breathe is mingled with toxic
smog, blurring the boundaries between natural and man-made
clouds. Earth’s atmosphere is changing in such profound ways
that the notion of pure natural clouds, untouched by
mankind, belongs to a more innocent age.

An aquarium containing a domestic
globe, a motor to turn the globe and electronic valve or
drip feed
which releases a fluoresceine tracing dye onto the sphere.
As the
sphere turns, the green dye wraps itself around the sphere,
enveloping it in what appears to be a thin gas or atmosphere
that
surrounds the planet Earth. The difference between emissions
and
atmosphere, the ‘man-influenced’ and the ‘natural’ climate
cannot be
easily defined.

ArtCOP22, Marrakesh, Morocco
7-18 November 2016
Exhibition at Wace-ArkaneAfrika in the green zone.
Video broadcast on ikonoTV during the month of November
every Thursday and Sunday at 9PM (Berlin, NY and Shanghai
time).

Seven years ago, during a residency at Pollinaria, we began
work on a humble little book about the perception of
atmospheric pollution clouds. Since then the book has grown
in length but at long last it is ready and in print! Many
thanks to the many people who helped along the way and
especially to guest authors Jens Hauser, Noortje Marres,
Gunnar Schmidt, Malcom Miles and Jean-Marc Chomaz.

Edited by the artists, Man Made Clouds Clouds is based on a
series of artistic interventions and a cultural analysis by
six authors of atmospheric emissions.

Natural clouds occupy a special place in our imaginations,
their countless forms and meanings offer infinite
possibilities for metaphor. HeHe's projects use clouds as a
visual metaphor to aestheticise toxin coated atmospheric
emissions. Smog, radioactive clouds, clouds produced by
exhaust fumes, cigarettes or industrial emissions are
visualised, highlighted, outlined, coloured or put under the
spotlight, to alert us— not without humour—on our arrival in
the Anthropocene age.

Of the fifteen projects shown and discussed in the book, the
most ambitious and emblematic is Nuage vert (Green Cloud)
which earned the prestigious Golden Nica at the festival Ars
Electronica in 2008. The book includes original
documentation on the reception of Nuage Vert which sparked a
political controversy when it was staged on a waste
incinerator cloud in Saint Ouen (2009) and Ivry-sur-Seine
(2010).

Man Made Clouds is also a work of craft. Each book contains
an ex-libris of smokeable paper, hand-made from 100% organic
tobacco, specially cultivated in the soil of Pollinaria,
Abruzzo, Italy.

It’s as if this massive artwork fell into the castle moat.
In this protected heritage sector, HeHe draws our attention
to an infrastructure – a symbol of progress and collective
energy - that is generally hidden in city centres. In a site
where nothing appears to indicate an industrial or
technological revolution has taken place, HeHe disrupts the
idyll of the city and plays with time. Although the
absurdity of the image will make you smile, one hopes it
will also question the aesthetic, historical and heritage
values we bestow upon monuments over time. With
Undercurrent, HeHe incites us to reflect on the origins of
our modern comfort and aspirations towards a sustainable
city.

HeHe use humour to subvert the implications and hidden
dimensions of ecological threats and challenges. HeHe have
devised site-specific personal rail systems around the world
- including Tapis Volant in Istanbul, H-Line in New York,
Metronome in Paris and M-Blem on the world’s first passenger
railway line from Liverpool to Manchester. For Exoplanet
Lot, HeHe have invented a new bicycle-train with a modular,
science-fiction inspired design which you can see parked in
this ‘station’ to explore the currently unused railway line
which traverses this beautiful and dramatic landscape.
Centipede merges a futuristic artistic vision with rural
regeneration: this autonomous multiple-driver vehicle might
one day travel on both road and rail, sustainably.

Centipede is equipped with technology that automatically
registers its past journeys. The data archive is accessible
here:http://centipede.hehe.org/

A particular atmosphere, invisible in a single image, can be
sensed in the air of Bruges in the lingering smell of
waffles, fries, carbonade and mussels. Daily trade is
predominately food, cooked and consumed on site for the
thousands of visitors to the city. There is a well disguised
infrastructure making this possible: The aromatic air has to
circulate, be guided, sucked away and eventually pushed out
into the atmosphere. All that is solid must melt into the
air. The Gentpoort, a former customs gate to control imports
and exports, is now a symbolic threshold between the
medieval city and the modern world outside. On its roof, two
of the original turrets are missing. The forms of these two
missing towers can be found in the sculpture installed in
the grass. Made from spiral galvanised tubing, fused
together as two half moons, it resembles a giant unpolished
diamond. Inside the building a distinctive mood has taken
over, literally inflecting the space with atmosphere.

On the occasion of the Bruges Contemporary Art and
Architecture Triennial 2015, eighteen artists created works
that imagine a confrontation between a small, preserved
medieval city and a 21st century megapolis. The German
British artist duo HeHe makes this confrontation visible and
audible. They placed a wrecked high voltage pylon in the
canal at the Oud Sint Jan site, a place that exudes medieval
atmosphere. The crackling and flashing installation draws
attention to the modern infrastructure that lies behind the
idyllic, timeless image of Bruges. Undercurrent a large
scale sculpture of modern technology in a setting of canals,
stepped gables and horse drawn carriages: HeHe disrupts the
idyll of medieval Bruges. Undercurrent triggers a visual and
auditory shock wave in an environment where there are no
signs of an industrial or technological revolution ever
having occurred. The size of the steel structure contrasts
with the small scale of the buildings and canals around it.
The pylon emits electrical hums, hisses, ticks and crackles.
Cables float on the water. At night, there are flashes of
light. The seemingly archaic construction disturbs the image
of the preserved old town. It tarnishes and it demands
attention, just as the omnipresence of pylons in other
environments disturbs the landscapes and lives around them.
The floating pylon also prompts reflection on urban issues,
such as energy supply and massive energy consumption, light
and noise pollution, changing energy needs and the demand
for cities to be sustainable. The high voltage pylon is a
symbol of progress and collective energy. Does the fallen
pylon refer to the end of utopian aspirations or to wasting
energy? Or will it rise again from the waters? At the same
time, this installation underlines the inevitability of
signs of technology floating to the surface even in a city
that is operated as a shiny, historical oasis.

HeHe takes a lighthearted approach to examining aspects of
transformation and energy transfer. They frequently cause
symbols and metaphors to converge with daily reality and
they confront and expose the implications and hidden
dimensions of ecological threats. Important to their work is
the interplay between the microscopically small and the
gigantically large: an example is electrical energy, itself
invisible and yet generated by huge machines and distributed
through highly visible networks. We then use this same
energy to hide the gargantuan machinery. This paradox is
alive and well in Bruges, an apparently medieval city where
any reference to its electrical network is hidden or denied,
while the city could not function without a daily power
supply. By making this symbol of the invisible abruptly
present on a stage where it cannot be ignored, HeHe creates
an ironic commentary: a mass produced object becomes a
curiosity in a city that counts on its preserved past to
make it unique.

Artistic engineers HeHe have turned the gallery space into
an experimental drilling site. The environment of the
gallery is transformed into an industrial landscape where
boreholes are drilled and waste chemicals are treated. HeHe
have begun initial exploratory tests to extract shale gas
through an innovative process known as fracking. Fracking is
short for ‘hydraulic fracturing’, a process of extracting
gas by pumping a highly pressurised mixture of water, sand
and chemicals underground. This opens fissures in
subterranean rocks releasing the gas trapped several miles
beneath the earth’s surface.